For Marcel Proust, music could be as intensely evocative as the taste of a madeleine, unleashing a torrent of memory and emotion.

In this programme, Chloë Hanslip and Danny Driver recreate a Proustian salon, featuring Beethoven’s late music, which he so admired, and the inspirational work of contemporaries Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Reynaldo Hahn, with the latter of whom he had a turbulent friendship.

Finally, they will play Saint-Saëns’ Sonata No. 1, thought to contain the model for Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’ in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, forever associated with Swann’s love for Odette: ‘And before Swann had the time to understand, and to tell himself, “It’s the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata, don’t listen!”, all his memories of the time when Odette loved him so, which he had managed to keep hidden in the depths of his being, tricked by the sudden beam from the days of love that they believed had returned, awoke, and in a flurry of wing-beats they rose to sing to him … the forgotten choruses of happiness.’